On Wednesday, after she finished some paperwork for her upcoming fight, the Brazilian mixed martial artist sat down with a translator to discuss her career and her upcoming opportunity, but several of the answers came back with the same theme.

“I want to be a champion,” Damm continued to tell MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com).

She certainly has the experience and, many say, the skills to do just that. The 31-year-old black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu who has spent much of her time training with her younger brother will continue her successful career in the Strikeforce women’s welterweight tournament on Friday.

Damm – like other participants Miesha Tate, Hitomi Akano and Maiju Kujala – will find out their semifinal matchups at their Strikeforce Challengers 10 weigh-in session today. The two-round tournament is meant to determine the No. 2 contender in the 135-pound division, and it occurs at the Dodge Theatre in Phoenix.

Current Strikeforce women’s welterweight champ Sarah Kaufman next fights Marloes Coenen, and the tournament winner gets the next crack at the division’s title.

Damm is one of the more mysterious and skilled fighters in that welterweight division. Since beginning her training in Brazil at age 15, and with inspiration from brother and fellow MMA notable Rodrigo Damm, she has become a strong practitioner of jiu jitsu and compiled a 15-3 record.

She is on a streak of 10 consecutive wins while training and fighting almost exclusively in Brazil, which adds to the intrigue surrounding her entering the tournament.

One thing is clear, though. She is focused on becoming a title-holder and hopes to gain respect from fans in the United States.

A brother’s care

By her teenage years, Damm had overcome a family history nearly devoid of athletics to follow Rodrigo into martial-arts training.

Aside from jiu jitsu, Damm learned capoeira, an art form popular in Brazil that morphs music, martial arts and dancing to increase body control, flexibility and movement.

Along the way, Damm grew close with Rodrigo and wanted to learn from him. He was a good teacher, she said. Years later, Rodrigo would go on to his own MMA career that has seen him go 9-4 with one string of eight consecutive wins. He has also fought at a Strikeforce event, where he lost to highly ranked Gilbert Melendez at the April 2009 “Strikeforce: Shamrock vs. Diaz” event.

At the time, growing up near Rio de Janeiro, they were just brother and sister competing and training.

“He is a very skilled fighter, one of the best at 155 pounds,” Damm said. “I am very inspired by him.”

By 2004, Damm was exploring taking fights for money after experiencing the world of jiu-jitsu tournaments, where she was successful. In hoping to display her skills learned from the mix of BJJ and capoeira – and prove to people she was not gaining attention in fighting just because she was attractive – she took her first fight in October 2004, about 10 years after she started training.

Coincidentally, her pro debut came just exactly a week before Rodrigo made his own professional debut, which began careers that would see the siblings go a combined 24-7 entering the Strikeforce tournament.

“He has helped me very much,” Damm said. “I hope we help each other.”

Showing the U.S.

Damm was four years into her professional career before she appeared in front of an American audience.

It was April 2008, and she had recently improved her record to 7-3 with a big victory against Jessica Aguilar in Canada. It was the fourth fight that advanced to a decision in her so-far 10-bout career, which means Damm has certainly proven her conditioning.

In April 2008, Damm appeared in Los Angeles at a Fatal Femmes Fighting show, where she beat Sophie Bagherdai by second-round submission. It was a good first impression with American crowds, which she has continued to hope to impress.

“I want to show them (American crowds) that I want to be the best,” Damm said. “I hope they can see how serious I am about my career.”

It is a career that has spanned several countries, including Japan and Costa Rica aside from Brazil, and been notable as much for her physical beauty and relative absence from the U.S. as for her wins. But with years of experience in Brazilian jiu jitsu and a competitive streak built by training with her brother and other males, Damm hopes to continue gaining success and fans.

If nothing else, because making a living in MMA has been more difficult then she thought it would be.

“Right now making money is hard,” Damm said. “Getting sponsors is hard, and the training is hard, but I very much want to make money. I hope to show I can fight well.”

Award-winning newspaper reporter Kyle Nagel is the lead features
writer for MMAjunkie.com. His weekly “Fight Path” column focuses on the
circumstances that led fighters to a profession in MMA. Know a fighter
with an interesting story? Email us at news [at] mmajunkie.com.

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